[ddeflyer]

Originally Posted by orthojoe

OP, this looks like a pretty straight forward situation to me. This has nothing to do with VSC.

It has everything to do with you still having steering lock applied when you dropped 2 off and immediately came back on track. You hooked the car. This is almost impossible to save. Think about it this way: When you drop 2 off and your steering wheel is still turned in a direction that will take you back on track, the FRONT tires gets back on pavement first and regains traction. However, the rear still doesn't have traction while it's on dirt. Then the rear suddenly gains traction as it comes back onto the pavement, and you still have steering lock. What happens then is major oversteer. The vast majority of cars have been lost on the race track in this fashion. Turn 3 and 4 at Laguna Seca. Turn 15 at Thunderhill.

What you should have done:
a) Realized that you were going too fast through that turn and that you weren't going to make it
b) drive straight off the track. Not just off. Straight off.
c) allow the car to settle and slow down off the track
d) slowly and gently bring the car back onto the track in a fashion where you are gliding back onto to the track with your steering wheel pointed straight forward as you get back on.

All this other talk about countersteer, adding throttle, reacting faster, etc, etc means nothing. As soon as you dropped 2 off, that all went out the window.

BTW, this wasn't a tank slapper. A tank slapper involves the rear end rotating from one direction to another. You only rotated in one direction: counter clockwise.

Glad to see that all you needed was a vacuum cleaner to get back into play.

There are alot of things I am still unsure about with all of this, but one that I am completely certain of is that the rear end of the car was yawing (relative to the front end) back and forth. It was not a major tank slapper and is barely visible in the video (frankly it is barely visible in the full res video even), but it did happen. I don't know if that had anything to do with the actual off or if it just distracted me so I didn't see how close I was to the berm, but it was there. If I had seen/felt I was going off I would have gone straight (which may be due to the distraction of the tail wagging) which I've done before (dropping two wheels and also on the other time I've gone four wheels off). Once I felt the tail pop I tried to go straight but it was too late.

As far as the actual dropping wheels off, even though it looks kind of like it from the video, I am not sure my front right wheel actually went off the berm. The rear right did for sure though. Tonight I am going to setup the gopro again and get some frame grabs to see where things line up from that perspective.

Honestly I managed to get myself into a situation that overwhelmed both my safety buffer (consumed by exiting the turn faster than I had ever exited it before and maybe some effect of the tail wagging making me track further out) and my ability to handle emergency situations (because there was a minor strange thing happening to the tail of the car that took my focus). Part of the learning experience is to understand what happened and my gut is telling me that this might not be the classic two wheels dropped scenario.